As death spike shows, April was cruelest Trumpmonth
On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence peddled an extraordinary fantasy about Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Pence’s tale of heroic, decisive leadership was so completely at odds with reality that pretty much the only words he spoke that weren’t lies were “a,” “and” and “the.”
And most media organizations did, indeed, point out the falsehoods.
Yet what seems to me to be missing from much of the commentary on the Republican carnival of disinformation is an acknowledgment that Trump’s worst hour came not during COVID-19’s initial surge but weeks later, when he did all he could to push America into a reckless — and maskless — reopening.
And he’s doing it again. Speaker after speaker at the Republican National Convention referred to COVID-19, if at all, in the past tense. Their not-sosubtle message was that the pandemic is over. But it isn’t, and the Trump administration is still failing to protect the American people.
If I had to pick a single day when America lost the fight against the coronavirus, it would be April 17. That was the day when Trump proclaimed his support for mobs — some of whose members were carrying guns — that were threatening Democratic state governments and demanding an end to social distancing. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” he tweeted, followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment.” (That last bit reads an awful lot like an incitement to armed insurrection.)
In so doing, Trump, in his eagerness to see good economic numbers, chose to disregard warnings from health experts that returning to business as usual would lead to a new surge in infections. The result was a catastrophe.
As in the early days of the pandemic, Trump and those around him wasted crucial weeks denying what was happening and refusing to take action. On June 16 an op-ed article by Mike Pence declared that there wasn’t a coronavirus “second wave.” (Spoiler: there was.) Four days later, Trump held an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, without social distancing and with few wearing masks, in an apparent attempt to convey the sense that things were fine.
Of course, things weren’t fine. Here’s one way to see how fine they weren’t: On the day
Trump issued his LIBERATE demands, around 33,000 Americans had died from COVID-19.
The total now is around 180,000.
And now the promised economic rebound is also falling short. Reopening produced a brief surge of returning jobs, but most states have noweither paused or reversed their reopening, and employment growth appears to have slowed drastically.
And then there’s the effect on education. By abandoning the fight against the coronavirus in the spring, Trump made it impossible for children to have anything resembling a normal school year.
It’s not just the speeches at the RNC. Trump loyalists are back to hawking miracle cures, with the FDA making claims about the virtues of administering blood plasma that baffled experts. And on Wednesday, the CDC made the shockingly irresponsible suggestion that people without COVID-19 symptoms abstain from testing.
In other words, there’s every indication the Trumpists want to do the same thing now that they’ve done twice before: deal with a deadly pandemic by pretending it either doesn’t exist or is already going away.